With this final difficulty, which, indeed, besets all such theories,
Edwards struggles long and with less than his usual vigour. He tries to
show, and perhaps successfully, that the difficulty concerns his
opponents as much as himself. They can, at least, escape only by
creating a new kind of necessity, under the name of contingency; for God
is, on this theory, like a mariner who has constantly to shape his
course to meet unforeseen and uncontrollable gusts of wind (v. 298); and
to make the best of it. He insists upon the difference, not very
congenial to his scheme, between ordering and permitting evil. The sun,
he says (v. 293), causes light, but is only the occasion of darkness.
If, however, the sun voluntarily retired from the world, it could
scarcely evade the responsibility of its absence. And, finally, he makes
the ordinary distinction, and that which is perhaps the best answer to
be made to an unanswerable difficulty. Christ's crucifixion, he says,
was so far bad as it was brought about by malignant murderers: but as
considered by God, with a view to all its glorious consequences, it was
not evil, but good (v. 297). And thus any action may have two aspects;
and that which appears to us, whose view is necessarily limited, as
simply evil, may, when considered by an infinite intelligence, as part
of the general order of things, be absolutely good. God does not will
sin as sin, but as a necessary part of a generally perfect system.

Here, however, in front of that ultimate mystery which occurs in all
speculation, I must take leave of this singular thinker. In a
frequently-quoted passage, Mackintosh speaks of his 'power of subtle
argument, perhaps unmatched, certainly unsurpassed amongst men.' The
eulogy seems to be rather overstrained, unless we measure subtlety of
thought rather by the complexity and elaboration of its embodiment than
by the keenness of the thought itself. But that Edwards possessed
extraordinary acuteness is as clear as it is singular that so acute a
man should have suffered his intellectual activity to be restrained
within such narrow fetters. Placed in a different medium, under the same
circumstances, for example, as Hume or Kant, he might have developed a
system of metaphysics comparable in its effect upon the history of
thought to the doctrines of either of those thinkers. He was, one might
fancy, formed by nature to be a German professor, and accidentally
dropped into the American forests. Far